The understanding of QM is obscured by a twofold “epistemological obstacle” (Bachelard 1938) that has taken quite different and apparently opposed forms in the interpretation of the theory: substantialism and instrumentalism. While substantialism is the ontological assumption that reality is entirely composed of individuals with permanent unity and identity (Bontems & de Ronde 2011), instrumentalism is the anti-realist assumption that science is just a procedure to make predictions about measurement outcomes (‘clicks’ in detectors). Instead of searching for new concepts that would explain what QM is really talking about, the Bohrian ‘solution’ that prevailed was, on the contrary, to subvert realism by retaining classical substantialist concepts as fictions embedded in paradoxical story-tellings illustrating experimental procedures with essential gaps bridged by irrepresentable notions such as ‘quantum particles’ and ‘quantum jumps’.

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